Summer Fruit Beers #4

STATS
  • Country: New Zealand
  • Style: Fruit Beer 
  • ABV: 6.5%
  • Serving Type: 330ml Bottle
  • Price: Slightly Pricey 
New Zealand is one of the world’s most progressive craft beer markets, and Invercargill is one of the countries leading micro-breweries. I’ve had a couple of their other beers but when I saw this Boysenberry flavoured beer I thought to myself what an excellent fruit beer this could make…

Don’t worry the title of this post is not a typo, it’s just some New Zealanders trying to be funny. This has quite a high alcohol percentage compared to most fruit beers I’ve had, so it will be interesting to see how this one goes. This will hopefully be the perfect beer for a 38 degree Melbourne day, I’m going to go outside and enjoy it, hopefully!

When I poured this beer, almost instantly I was impressed with it’s appearance. The colour is superb, I would call it quite a deep pink colour. It also has a pink coloured head, which was quite a bit bigger than what the photo shows, but it does disipate to a thin layer quite quickly. This pink layer does hang around though for the duration of drinking and leaves a mild lacing on the glass. It’s a great looking fruit beer.

As expected the dominant smell in this beer is of boysenberries. Now whether those boysenberries are real is another question, this beer smells almost like a syrup at first. However over the course of the nose there are elements of sour berries and a strange creamy nature. The overall impression I receive from this beer is that it smells strangely like a boysenberry ice-cream. Strange but surprisingly good.

This beer has a rather strange mix of sweetness and tartness. The initial taste is of quite tart almost unripened boysenberries before quickly being replaced by a more palateable sweeter berry flavour. There is a creamy texture to this beer which I would never have expected from a normal fruit beer, but it actually works really well in this beer. The carbonation is surprisingly low, but for mine it doesn’t detract from the beer at all.

The Invercargill Boysenbeery has surprised me quite alot. The texture of the beer is excellent, the strange creamy mouthfeel I think helps to disguise the high level of alcohol in the beer, which while you can’t taste it, you certainly do feel it after a couple. The beer looks good, tastes strange but quite nice and most importantly does it’s job! The beer is very refreshing and not too bitter, this is quite an approachable beer for most and is certainly worth a try, although it won’t be to everyone’s taste.

Remember it’s always Beer O’Clock somewhere in the world!